How Free Has God Made Us?
Freedom, limitation, and the goodness of God
I have been circling around the Lord’s decision to give humanity freedom, and around the limitations He has placed upon that freedom. From one vantage point, God appears remarkably permissive, allowing human beings to exercise their wills in directions that range from holiness, creativity and love to destruction, exploitation and cruelty. From another vantage point, He appears almost peculiar in His limitations: human beings are placed within a creation we did not initiate, governed by realities we did not establish, and confronted finally by death and judgement. And we are utterly powerless to change any of these realities. The freedom He gives is considerable, but so are His limitations.
The premise I am exploring is reasonably straightforward. God has created human beings with the ability to choose, and that He permits those choices within certain confines. As Stephen Covey noted in his most famous book, we can choose our choices, we cannot choose the consequences of those choices. I may decide whether or not to jump into the pool; I do not get to decide whether that decision will leave me dry. Human beings do not merely select between options prepared for them without consequence; we can cultivate what is good, or corrupt what is good, respect another person’s freedom, or impose themselves upon that person so completely that very little freedom remains. Assuming this premise is accurate, what else can be extracted from it? What does the nature of the freedom God has given reveal about His purposes, His limitations upon that freedom, and the manner in which a disciple of Christ is to exercise the power of choice within it?
Too much freedom, or too little?
The familiar question concerning the goodness of God and the presence of evil deserves to be given serious thought. The reality of suffering is not reduced by examining it philosophically, and intellectual formulations do not diminish the experience of a person who has suffered. I have known something of such suffering myself, and I have walked alongside others whose losses cannot be rendered tidy by said intellectual formulations. Nevertheless, the philosophical question remains, and I seek to give it the concentrated thought it deserves.
I have increasingly wondered whether two contrary complaints are often present beneath objections to the manner in which God governs human freedom:
God respects freedom too much.
God does not respect freedom enough.
When one person directs his freedom towards malicious ends, it is understandable to ask why God does not interfere. If one person is exploiting another, or if a person is using his authority to destroy those under him, the complaint is that God has allowed the perpetrator too much room in which to operate. A person observing such things may reasonably think that freedom has been extended beyond what goodness should permit.
The movement in the other direction is equally familiar. The same human being who wants God to interrupt the malicious will of another may resist the idea that God should govern his desires, contradict his judgements, or hold him accountable for what he does. The complaint is no longer that God permits too much freedom, but that He has placed boundaries around it at all. The person who complains that God does not forcibly intervene to prevent evil in one expression, may themselves be profligates of different kinds of evil.
I have often thought of the seemingly contradictory perspectives represented by different tracks of the Black-Eyed Peas; one song speaking presumptuously about the absence of love in God's creation, whilst another track makes a mockery of that same God's commands around sexual purity.
The formulation as I have stated it does not encompass every possible objection to God's goodness or power, though I think it does come close. It does, however, expose a difficulty which is often left unexamined. A person may desire a world in which God prevents the destructive choices of others while preserving his own choices almost entirely untouched.
At what point should God intervene in the human will? Before the murderer murders? Before he begins planning the murder? Before he begins hating? Before resentment develops into hatred? Before envy gives birth to resentment? Or before the first thought occurs which might, under certain conditions and after a long series of choices, finally move in that direction?
Where exactly would I have Him take control?
The further I follow that question, the more difficult it becomes to preserve anything recognisable as human agency. A world in which God prevented every corruption of freedom would require considerably more intervention than at the moment an act becomes visible. It would require the continual government of thought, desire, intention and action, because the completed act is usually the late expression of movements that have already been taking place within the person. Perhaps someone might decide that such a world would be preferable, but the preference would need to be stated forthrightly: it would be a desire not merely for God to restrain certain uses of human freedom, but for Him to exercise comprehensive control over the interior and exterior life of the creature. In other words, freedom would not really be free.
Freedom for cultivation
The freedom God has given is not concerned only with the possibility of wrongdoing. Human beings have been granted an extraordinary capacity to cultivate the world and themselves within it. A person can compose music, investigate the structure of creation, write something that awakens another mind, or produce beauty from materials which were previously bland or obscure. Humanity can fill the world with literature, humour, culinary delight, artistic expression and the pleasures of colour, scent, sound, texture and form. What a wonderful gift to be given!
This is part of what draws me towards the old language of Verum, Bonum, Pulchrum: Truth, Goodness, Beauty. These are not simply ideals against which behaviour can be measured, nor are they ornaments placed around an otherwise ordinary life. They describe realities to which a human being can increasingly join himself.
There is something playful in this invitation. The Lord creates a world full of possibility and invites human beings to discover, combine, enjoy and extend what He has made. Sacred work need not always be solemn work; it can include the enjoyment of becoming more capable, more perceptive and more fruitful. I discovered only last year that certain Trappist monasteries enjoy prayer, meditation, and work through the brewing of ales, and that this practice has continued for centuries. And I enjoy the fruit of their labour! In a limited creaturely manner, God invites us to join in the joy of bringing something forth.
Such an invitation requires choice, but the choice is rarely exhausted in one grand moment of decision. It is more often expressed through a long succession of smaller movements in which attention, imagination and will are gradually directed somewhere. The invitation towards truth, goodness and beauty is repeatedly presented, as is the invitation towards their privations: deception, corruption and desecration. Individual choices matter, but they do not exist as unrelated fragments. They reveal an orientation, and through repetition they strengthen it.
This does not mean that every action flows perfectly from a settled heart, nor that a person cannot act against his usual orientation. It does suggest that freedom is formative. The repeated decision to attend to truth makes some future choices more available and others less attractive; the repeated accommodation of deception works in the opposite direction. A person is not only deciding what to do but, through what he repeatedly does, participating in the formation of the one who will make the next decision.
When one freedom encounters another
Any examination of freedom becomes inadequate if it treats each human will as though it existed in a private territory untouched by other wills. Human beings occupy the same world, desire many of the same things, depend upon and compete with one another, love and impose themselves on one another. One person may exercise his freedom in a manner that dramatically reduces the available freedom of someone else.
Human trafficking, exploitation, assault and murder demonstrate this plainly, although the principle can be observed in less extreme forms wherever one person controls or manipulates the choices, environment or future of another.
This prevents me from concluding that freedom is always preserved by non-interference. There are circumstances in which refusing to restrain an aggressor does not honour freedom in general; it simply leaves the stronger will free to impose upon the weaker. The protection of one person may therefore require the forcible limitation of another.
As I reflected in a sermon earlier this year, sometimes the force of evil can only be overcome by a greater force of good. The important question, however, is not merely whether greater force is available, but what makes that force good.
How does a disciple of Christ restrain evil without becoming governed by the same thing he is attempting to restrain?
The twentieth century provides a curious illustration. One of my personal heroes of history, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, fought against Hitler while serving Stalin. The evil of the Nazi regime was not made less evil by acknowledging the evil of Stalin’s regime, and the evil of Stalin’s regime was not made holy because his soldiers were fighting Hitler. A person may correctly identify something monstrous in his opponent while remaining joined to something monstrous himself.
I am troubled by how easily Hitler can function as the complete historical symbol of political evil while Stalin recedes into a more indistinct part of the cultural memory. Remembering one and neglecting the other creates the impression that opposition to Hitler was sufficient proof of goodness. It was not. It is not. The enemy of an evil man is not thereby made good, and the defeat of one form of evil does not sanctify whatever force happened to overcome it.
This is more than a historical observation. A person does not become good merely because the thing he opposes is evil. A righteous cause cannot, by itself, transform the character of the one pursuing it, nor can it justify every method used in its defence. Evil may be resisted through vanity, an appetite for domination or destruction, or simply evil sadistic desire. Sadism repeatedly dressed itself in moral language in the gulags. The stated objective may be 'justice' while the interior movement remains an enacting of cruelty towards the dehumanised 'other'.
Abiding in the One who is good
Jesus’ teaching, “No one is good but One, that is, God,” places a necessary limit upon the confidence I might otherwise place in my own moral judgement. Goodness is not a possession that I carry independently, ready to be applied to the world whenever I am sufficiently certain that another person is wrong. Whatever goodness operates within me has its source in the Lord, and whatever capacity I possess to resist evil without becoming joined to it depends upon abiding in Him.
This is where Truth, Goodness, Beauty cease to be merely philosophical categories. They have their source, unity and fullness in God, and they are revealed to the disciple through Christ. To abide in truth it is not enough to simply maintain accurate propositions while the heart becomes corrupt, all the while deceiving itself about its own sinfulness. To abide in goodness is not simply to pursue a desirable outcome while adopting a paradigm of 'by any means necessary.' And to abide in beauty is not to consume and discard what is attractive but rather to join oneself to beauty, to accept the invitation to become a greater vessel and creator of beauty. Abiding in Christ draws the whole person into fellowship with the One from whom these realities proceed.
I do not mean that abiding removes the necessity of force, consequence or judgement. A disciple of Christ may still need to restrain a person physically, report criminal conduct, or participate in the lawful punishment of wrongdoing. Grace does not require evil to be ignored or denied or for consequences to be removed.
If Christ is genuinely present in the disciple’s resistance to evil, the difference should be perceptible rather than merely asserted. Force is directed towards stopping the evil rather than satisfying a desire to control or dominate. The person committing evil is held accountable without being reduced to the evil he has committed.
I think this is connected to the almost impossible-sounding task of perfectly hating sin while perfectly loving the sinner. Such a posture is beyond the reliable capacity of the unsubmitted human will. Hatred of sin often splashes over onto hatred of the person, while love for the person can gradually expand to become subtle, or overt, acceptance of sin. Christ holds grace and truth together without diluting either, and the disciple learns to do the same by abiding in Him and being His student.
The first movement towards the person committing evil may therefore be an invitation to acknowledgement and repentance. If he turns willingly from what he has done, he can be received into a process of restoration, although restoration may be long and may not immediately return him to the position or relationship he previously enjoyed. If he refuses, the disciple may be required to use whatever legitimate force is available to resist and restrain him. In either case, the aim is not the triumph of one private will over another, but the submission of human agency to the One who alone is good.
That is the distinction I am trying to understand. Restraint exercised by a disciple abiding in Christ should carry a different quality from restraint exercised through superiority or contempt. It may be equally decisive and, under some circumstances, equally severe, but it must not be animated by the same spirit. The intent underneath the action is distinct; for the disciple of Christ force may be deployed to restrain, resist or expose deception, desecration or corruption, and this always in the service of the transcendentals. Truth, Goodness, Beauty shining through a person will make evil more recognisable; the contrast of the transcendental and its privation undeniable.
The limit no human freedom escapes
However extensive human freedom may be, it operates within a boundary no human being can remove. The ruler and the ruled, the person remembered across centuries and the person whose name is soon forgotten, will each have their freedom curtailed by death.
There is no expression of human freedom that can free itself from death.
Death is the final limitation put on human sin. In some ways, many ways, I am grateful that this is so. There are human beings who would continue to exert all manner of cruelty towards others for all eternity if they were permitted. History is replete with these men and women. I would posit that contemporary society is not short on similar characters and motivations. I am grateful that death brings their earthly capacity to inflict cruelty upon others to a forceful end. It is a just, necessary even, response of God to say that the wages of sin is death.
Yet death was given as a means to put an end to sin, not an end to life.
Christ alone confronts death with a freedom that death itself cannot overcome.
The Cross of Calvary is the ultimate combination of the transcendentals and their privations. Truth is opposed by deception, goodness by corruption, and beauty by desecration, yet the privations do not acquire an independent or final existence. They act parasitically upon what God has made, and Calvary becomes the very place where death is swallowed up by Him who is life.
What is this freedom for?
I return, then, to the initial premise. God has created human beings for good purposes: life, love, holiness, enjoyment and fellowship with Him and with one another. He has given humanity the capacity to exercise authority, creativity and dominion within creation, and the freedom He permits is extensive enough for the exercise of those capacities to become indescribably beautiful or unspeakably horrific. A person can join himself to truth, goodness, beauty, or he can direct the same agency towards deception, corruption, desecration.
This freedom is not unlimited. Human beings are creatures rather than self-originating gods. One will encounters and is limited by other wills, moral action remains subject to judgement, and death places an end upon every attempt to extend creaturely power indefinitely. Yet within those limitations, a considerable field of action remains, and within that field a person is not merely selecting experiences but gradually becoming someone.
I do not think the goodness of God can be understood by imagining that goodness would require Him either to remove all meaningful freedom or to permit freedom without limitation. Both possibilities would undo something central to the world He appears to have chosen to create. The more difficult possibility - the possibility I believe to be true - is that God grants genuine agency, allows its consequences to unfold to a degree that can be difficult to comprehend, enters the suffering produced within that creation, restrains human freedom through death, and invites human beings into a freedom which can ultimately be completed only in Christ.
This does not answer every question concerning suffering, nor does it make every divine limitation immediately intelligible. It does, however, alter the direction of the inquiry. The question for me is no longer only why God allows human beings to exercise so much freedom, but what human freedom is for, what it is forming within the person who exercises it. Abiding in Him means becoming more. Day by day, choice by choice I am accepting (or declining) invitations to become someone new. It is change by degrees. Who am I becoming? Who do I want to become? What will I do with the freedom given me?
The more I think about it, the more I desire to accept His invitation to create, celebrate and enjoy His truth, goodness and beauty, and to turn away from their privations.
